Mixed Race Studies

Netflix’s ‘Passing’ could have been me

My Imperfect Life
2022-02-08

Asha Swann
Toronto, Canada

Anchored by Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, ‘Passing‘ on Netflix tells the story of racial passing back in 1920s New York. But it’s more relevant, and personal, than ever

In the film Passing on Netflix, two mixed-race women in 1920s America struggle to find their place when society can’t put them in the right box. It’s not an uncommon pain—talk to any mixed-race person and odds are they’ll be able to tell you at least a dozen horror stories about their identity being misunderstood, fetishized, or stereotyped.

In the Netflix film, the women, Irene (played by Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga), are two sides of the same coin. Both light-skinned, Irene “passes” as white accidentally, whereas Clare “passes” on purpose to gain social status. What follows is an incredibly complex story about what it means to be somebody when the world sees you as something else.

When my dad would pick me up from third grade, kids would always ask if I’m adopted. There’s no way that Black man could be my dad, not when I’m so pale. After my parents split up and I went to live with my white mother and her parents in the suburbs, kids were ready to call me a liar when I would talk about being mixed. Though I never chose to pass—ask any mixed person and they’ll show you that genetics are messy and don’t give you much of a choice…

Read the entire article here.

The best way to get ahead is now to lie

The UnHerd
2022-01-18

Blake Smith, Harper-Schmidt Fellow
University of Chicago

We can’t blame students for fabricating stories of hardship

University education was once sold to adolescents as a place where they might ‘find themselves’ through the liberal arts. In this fantasy, students could discover a more ‘authentic’ self as they learned, through the fearless and broad-ranging inquiry of impassioned conversations in and outside of seminars, to question received ideas. Academia today is certainly a place where people can themselves anew, if not more authentically.

Scholars like Jessica Krug or Carrie Bourassa, both white women, reimagined themselves as women of colour. Rhodes scholar Mackenzie Fierceton, also a white woman, was recently revealed to have constructed an elaborate persona as a ‘first-generation’ college student who had been passed through the foster system and suffered horrific physical abuse. She had in fact been privately educated and raised by her radiologist mother.

Such cases are only the most visible portion of the constant, ubiquitous deceit that is now built into the application process, which rewards candidates who can most convincingly tell stories — that is, who can lie…

Read the entire article here.

Belle de Costa Greene: Library Director, Advocate, and Rare Books Expert.

Headlines & Heroes: Newspapers, Comics, & More Fine Print
Library of Congress
Washington, D.C.
2022-02-08

Joanna Colclough, Reference Librarian
Serial and Government Publications Division

In 1999, biographer Jean Strouse published her work on J. P. Morgan, railroad magnate, financier, and New York millionaire of the late 1800s. Of course, Belle de Costa Greene is featured in the book – she worked closely with Morgan for the last 8 years of his life as his personal librarian, managing his private art and rare book collection. Greene’s name was not unknown to history. The first half of the 20th century saw Greene rise as a top expert in the rare book world as librarian and first director of the Morgan Library and Museum. But Strouse discovered something new about Greene that presented Greene in whole new light. In an article for The New Yorker (March 29, 1999, p. 66-79), Strouse tells how she located Greene’s birth certificate in Washington, D.C. which was marked with a C for “colored.”

Greene passed as white for her entire professional life. This is a fact both surprising and not – surprising that such a secret could be so well-kept and not surprising considering the prejudice of society…

Read the entire article here.

He risked his life to become a founding father of civil rights. Why was he forgotten?

The Los Angeles Times
2022-02-09

Stuart Miller

Mention Walter White and it will likely conjure an image of Bryan Cranston from “Breaking Bad,” playing the man who snarled, “I am the danger.”

But there’s a real-life Walter White who deserves to be a household name — a Black man who faced unfathomable danger in pursuit of truth and justice as he did battle with the American way. White should rank alongside Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as a founding father of the civil rights era. Yet he is all but forgotten today.

That oversight gets an overdue correction in A.J. Baime’s engrossing new biography, “White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret.”…

Read the entire article here.

A Man Called White and Exploring America’s Darkest Secret in “White Lies”

Chicago Review of Books
2022-02-07

Steve Nathans-Kelly

An interview with A.J. Baime about his new book, “White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret.”

When we speak of the peak years of the Civil Rights Movement, typically we refer to the period beginning with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56—which thrusted Martin Luther King, Jr. onto the national stage. This canonical era concludes with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in August 1965 following the pivotal showdown in Selma. Those eleven years formed the Movement’s dominant narrative, which blurred and obscured most of what came before and after (and oversimplified much that’s in between).

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s landmark 2005 essay, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Uses of the Past,” ushered in a critical reassessment of these artificial historical boundaries. Hall argued that anointing this era not only limited the movement’s lifespan to a “halcyon decade,” but also narrowed its goals to the pursuit of a vaguely defined “color-blind” society, a notion later used to recast King and others as proponents of neoliberal social and fiscal policy.

Focusing exclusively on this period also meant overlooking many of the foundational figures who preceded it and laid the groundwork for nearly everything that followed.

One such figure is Walter F. White—known in his lifetime as “Mr. NAACP”—who led America’s most powerful civil rights organization from 1929 until his death in 1955. White featured prominently in nearly every important battle against segregation and white supremacy during those years. White’s extraordinary life demonstrates how blinding white Americans’ appalling lack of color-blindness could be.

By all appearances, the blond-haired and blue-eyed Walter White was white. But like his multiracial parents, both born to formerly enslaved people, White identified as Black throughout his life. In his early years with the NAACP, he used his appearance to infiltrate Southern white communities as an undercover white man, gathering critical information on brutal lynchings from killers keen to brag about their crimes…

Read the entire interview here.

Mirror Girls

Little, Brown Young Readers
2022-02-08
304 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9780759553859
eBook ISBN-13: 9780759553859
Audiobook ISBN-13: 9781549165962

Kelly McWilliams

A thrilling gothic horror novel about biracial twin sisters separated at birth, perfect for fans of Lovecraft Country and The Vanishing Half

As infants, twin sisters Charlie Yates and Magnolia Heathwood were secretly separated after the brutal lynching of their parents, who died for loving across the color line. Now, at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, Charlie is a young Black organizer in Harlem, while white-passing Magnolia is the heiress to a cotton plantation in rural Georgia.

Magnolia knows nothing of her racial heritage, but secrets are hard to keep in a town haunted by the ghosts of its slave-holding past. When Magnolia finally learns the truth, her reflection mysteriously disappears from mirrors—the sign of a terrible curse. Meanwhile, in Harlem, Charlie’s beloved grandmother falls ill. Her final wish is to be buried back home in Georgia—and, unbeknownst to Charlie, to see her long-lost granddaughter, Magnolia Heathwood, one last time. So Charlie travels into the Deep South, confronting the land of her worst nightmares—and Jim Crow segregation.

The sisters reunite as teenagers in the deeply haunted town of Eureka, Georgia, where ghosts linger centuries after their time and dangers lurk behind every mirror. They couldn’t be more different, but they will need each other to put the hauntings of the past to rest, to break the mirrors’ deadly curse—and to discover the meaning of sisterhood in a racially divided land.

White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret

Mariner Books
2022-02-08
400 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0358447757
Paperback ISBN: 978-0358581772
eBook ISBN: 9780358439660
Audiobook ISBN: 9780358581932

A. J. Baime

A riveting biography of Walter F. White, a little-known Black civil rights leader who passed for white in order to investigate racist murders, help put the NAACP on the map, and change the racial identity of America forever

Walter F. White led two lives: one as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance and the NAACP in the early twentieth century; the other as a white newspaperman who covered lynching crimes in the Deep South at the blazing height of racial violence. Born mixed race and with very fair skin and straight hair, White was able to “pass” for white. He leveraged this ambiguity as a reporter, bringing to light the darkest crimes in America and helping to plant the seeds of the civil rights movement. White’s risky career led him to lead a double life. He was simultaneously a second-class citizen subject to Jim Crow laws at home and a widely respected professional with full access to the white world at work. His life was fraught with internal and external conflict—much like the story of race in America. Starting out as an obscure activist, White ultimately became Black America’s most prominent leader. A character study of White’s life and career with all these complexities has never been rendered, until now.

By the award-winning, best-selling author of The Accidental President, Dewey Defeats Truman, and The Arsenal of Democracy, White Lies uncovers the life of a civil rights leader unlike any other.

Taffy Abel medaled in the 1924 Olympics. Few knew of his Indigenous heritage

National Public Radio
2022-02-07

Troy Oppie, Host/Reporter
Boise State Public Radio, Boise, Idaho

At the 1924 Winter Olympics in Chamonix, France, about two dozen American dignitaries and athletes trudged through snowy streets in the opening parade. The American flag – then with just 48 stars – was carried by hockey player Clarence “Taffy” Abel.

What few outside his family and close friends knew at that time: Taffy Abel was Native American – the first Indigenous athlete to carry the flag at the Olympics. Within days he’d become the first Native American to win a medal in winter games history.

“A Native American, carrying our stars and stripes, nearly 100 years ago,” reflects George Jones, Abel’s 73-year-old nephew by marriage. His voice quivered with pride as he spoke of that moment.

Family stories passed down tell how Abel, his sister Gertrude, and his mother Charlotte – a Canadian Chippewa (now called Ojibwe) – all passed themselves off as white, mostly by not talking about it.

“The main thing that they were fearful of,” says Jones, “[was] that Taffy and his sister would be taken away to an Indian residential school.”…

Read the entire story here.

Rebecca Hall says directing ‘Passing’ helped ‘unlock’ Black family history

theGrio
2021-11-10

Mariel Turner, Senior Editor

“It really gave me an access point into the history of my family that otherwise would have remained hidden,” the first-time director says

Writing and directing Passing has given Rebecca Hall a host of things: critical acclaim, first-time directing experience and award season buzz. One thing she didn’t expect, however, is the deep dive into her family’s own history that the film spurred.

The 39-year-old actress-director told theGrio exclusively that reading the 1929 novel on which Passing is based, and directing the film itself, helped her to uncover her own family’s history of passing and white assimilation. Hall, the daughter of Detroit opera singer Maria Ewing and Royal Shakespeare Company founder Peter Hall, confirmed that her grandfather was Black and white-passing…

Read the entire article here.

‘Once We Were Slaves’ examines fluidity of race through a Jewish lens

Forward
2022-01-28

TaRessa Stovall

Have you heard the story of the Jewish mother and children who were born enslaved in the Caribbean and became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York?

Professor Laura Arnold Leibman was researching Jewish communities in Barbados when she discovered two small ivory portraits belonging to a Jewish heiress from New York. She traced the family’s ancestors back to Bridgetown, Barbados in the 1700s. But instead of discovering an exclusively Sephardic ancestry, she uncovered a much more complex story of a diverse Jewish family whose identities were impacted by time and place.

Her findings became the book, “Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family.”…

Read the entire article here.